Although I have been drawing cartoons since childhood. Only recently have I realized it is my super power. I’m like the cartoonist equivalent to a rock star.
In grade school, the girls would line line, waiting for me to draw them cartoon characters like Snoopy. The boys, other other had, had other needs. Once I had forged someone’s parent’s signature on a permissions slip perfectly.
I also used this super power to get out of the jail of being sent to my room. I simply wrote a generic note saying that I was sorry, but it was accompanied by a drawing of a cute Disney cartoon. The cartoon would spring me.
Around this time, the Pittsburgh Pirates were a World Series-caliber team with the slugger, Dave Parker. I sketched his portrait with a ball point pen on loose-leaf paper.
Shortly after that, my parents took us to see a baseball game at Three Rivers Stadium. During batting practice, my father took the portrait of Dave Parker down to the dugout.
Weeks later, I received an autograph baseball of the ‘79 Pirates in the mail.
It does not end there.
Sometime in my teenage years, I began drawing a cartoon character named Shorty. Shorty wore shorts, a T-shirt with a capital S on it, and a cap with a spinner. He rode a skateboard to get around on.
I did not develop Shorty into a comic strip. I just drew him on greeting cards and envelopes for family and friends. My mother would always nag me: “Why don’t you try to do something with Shorty?” as in signicate him. I always found an excuse not to.
Decades later.
On March 9, 2024, I sent a Shorty cartoon via text to a friend of mine. She could not understand why Shorty was not signicated.
But this time that was not the end of it this time.
The beauty and convenience of the Internet
I began looking up cartoonist on YouTube, which led me to gag cartoons and the cartoonists who drew them, which led me to the New Yorker magazine, which led me to cartoonists like Roz Chast, David Sipress, George Booth, and Hillary Fitzgerald.
This, of course, inspired me to send in gag cartoons to the New Yorker. The New Yorker, I quickly learned, is the go-to publication for cartoonists who draw single-panel gag cartoons.
The first two gag cartoons I sent to the New Yorker were Yard Sale and Rub Me the Wrong Way.
I was certain both cartoon had a sure shot of getting published. I was sadly mistaken.
This did not discourage me from drawing cartoons. I became a cartoon-drawing machine and began drawing cartoons daily. On a good day, I drew five cartoons!
I kept sending cartoons in to the New Yorker, only to receive nothing but nos in return.
At this point, I had been drawing cartoons on plain old copy paper with a pen—nothing fancy like art paper and a fountain pen. I should have, however, been using the drawing table that my late father had been for me out of poplar wood and completely adjustable. The table looks like something right out of the Renaissance!
Unfortunately, I was too lazy to carry the drawing table down from the attic.
Weeks into cartooning, I realized that artists were drawing on a digital tablet. I decided to buy one. I went the economic route, $39.95, and bought a pen tablet with a stylus.
I thought learning the pen tablet would be tricky, looking at the computer screen while you draw on the tablet, but to my surprise, it dd not present a real problem.
About a month in, I decided to buy an active-screen tablet from Amazon.
The active-screen was not what I had expected.
The active-screen tablet had a glass surface, which I believe was an eighth-inch thick. When you draw on it, the stylus does not actually touch the active screen but just the surface of the glass. This leaves an eighth-inch gap in the drawn line between the surface of the screen and the active screen.
Also, the price of the active-screen tablet was a bit pricey at $179, well, at least for me, so I was not too disappointed returning it. I can certainly live with then tablet for cartooning. In case you are wondering there is no gap. The surface of the tablet is plastic, black, and matted.
The New Yorker, in the meantime, had not accepted a cartoon. I was submitting fifteen cartoon each time.
The New Yorker has a tricky submissions policy: They will not accept previously published cartoons. I guess because they are considered the no. 1 magazine to submit cartoons to, they want to be the first to publish it.
I could not live with their policy. It puts your cartoons in cartoon limbo. Other publications like The Reader’s Digest do not have such a policy—I would publish them elsewhere—including the cartoons that had been rejected.
I have found several places to publish my gag cartoons: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
They claim that Instagram is the best platform to publish still one-panel gag cartoons, but I am still not convinced. I will admit, however, that I published an animated version of a cartoon called No Trespassing, and it is the first cartoon to hit 1,000 views, which I call the 1k Club.
The last time I looked, No Trespassing reached close to 1,100 views on Instagram.
I know. Know. 1,000 views is nothing, but it is a start.
The animated version of No Trespassing I will get into in another post.
I published two more cartoons on Instagram—Be Careful Who You Moon and Shut Up, or I’ll Shoot. Be Careful Who You Moon surpassed 2,600 views. Shut Up, or I’ll Shoot surpassed 1,600 views. Hope.
Until then, my new friends, you guessed it, my cartoons can be seen on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.